Growing your business

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Competition Commission - Our response

You may be aware of the current Competition Commission investigation, and I wanted to share with you our view and assessment of the market.

Please read our report on what we've been doing to support the investigation.

We believe that PMI provides an incredibly valuable benefit for both the consumer and corporate market. It’s really important that we consider both consumers and corporates when we talk about the market, because they both have roles to play within it.

The rising costs are leading to individuals and businesses reducing or cancelling their cover, and whilst we have seen growth within our own portfolio within 2012, the market as a whole is in decline.

I believe there are three main levers to reduce costs: our expenses; hospital costs; and specialist consultant charges.

We are continually focussed on our own expenses within Aviva and have worked very hard year on year to significantly reduce wastage across the business which has resulted in a substantial reduction in our expense ratio over the last five years. Whilst we will continue to remain very focussed on our own expenses, I believe much greater opportunity exists within the hospital and specialist consultant arenas.

We’ve also worked hard around care pathways; we were first to market with Our Back Up proposition, which initially focussed on back pain but was so successful that it has now been rolled out in the corporate market to manage all musculo-skeletal conditions in a better way with an intention to extend in to the SME and Individual markets going forward.

We are also implementing an online specialist and hospital finder tool to better support and respond to the increasing demand for open referral claims, and will be launching a new open referral PMI proposition for corporates later this year in addition to our current PMI offering.

We think these are great examples of how we can both improve the outcome for our customers and manage costs in a sustainable way which is at the core of what we want to do.

We want to make PMI more affordable without compromising the quality and service, and we’re hoping that the remedies the Competition Commission are reviewing will help us do these things.

As the investigation develops, we will provide further updates. In the meantime, if you have any questions please feel free to contact your usual account manager, who will be delighted to help you.